Even as he continues to seek one cease-fire in Ukraine and reckons with the breakdown of another in Gaza, U.S. President Donald Trump is escalating the U.S. military campaign in Yemen against the Iran-backed Houthis, a militant group that threatens regional peace, Israel’s security, and global commerce.
What’s not clear is whether more bombs will finally achieve Washington’s goals in Yemen—or what those goals even are under Trump 2.0.
Even as he continues to seek one cease-fire in Ukraine and reckons with the breakdown of another in Gaza, U.S. President Donald Trump is escalating the U.S. military campaign in Yemen against the Iran-backed Houthis, a militant group that threatens regional peace, Israel’s security, and global commerce.
What’s not clear is whether more bombs will finally achieve Washington’s goals in Yemen—or what those goals even are under Trump 2.0.
Beginning Saturday and continuing daily since then, U.S. forces near the Red Sea have launched dozens of precision strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen, targeting radars, mobile rocket launchers, drone sites, training camps, and headquarters, reportedly killing more than 50 people, including several Houthi leaders as well as five children.
“While we won’t talk about it publicly, just know there is a design to the operation,” said Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the director of operations for the U.S. Joint Staff, at a Defense Department briefing at the Pentagon. The operation, he said, “will continue in the coming days until we achieve the president’s objectives.”
What those objectives are, exactly, is not clear. The administration has said that it aims to degrade the Houthis’ ability to interdict global shipping, which they have been interfering with since late 2023. The Biden administration attacked the Houthis repeatedly but was unable to break the group’s stranglehold on one of the world’s key shipping lanes.
The Trump administration also hopes to send a forceful message to Iran, the Houthis’ principal source of backing and arms, as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign meant to force Tehran to negotiate the future of its nuclear weapons and missile programs.
But the deadly U.S. strikes are also meant, according to U.S. Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell, “to defend our homeland.”
They’re also part of a wider escalation in the region after the White House reportedly gave Israel a green light to resume large-scale bombing in Gaza, with the death toll topping 400 people since the attacks resumed on Tuesday.
The stepped-up U.S. effort to go after the Houthis is a way to target one of the few remaining Iranian proxy groups that still retains cohesion and the ability to strike Israel and Western targets after the decimation of Hamas (in Gaza) and Hezbollah (in Lebanon) by Israeli forces over the past year.
The Houthis have repeatedly fired missiles and drones at Israel, and Israeli forces are on high alert for a resumption of such attacks after a brief hiatus in the wake of the Gaza cease-fire.
And those attacks are incoming. Last week, after Israel cut off aid deliveries to Gaza, the Houthis again began targeting Israeli and Western commercial ships around the Red Sea and the crucial choke point of Bab el-Mandeb. The U.S. strikes will likely lead to further Houthi retaliation on both commercial shipping and U.S. warships, experts said.
On Tuesday, the group launched a ballistic missile at Israel that the Israel Defense Forces said was successfully shot down before it entered the country’s borders.
There’s little doubt that the Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, are a problem for Yemen and the region. A Zaydi Shiite Islamist political and military group that emerged from Yemen’s civil war in the 1990s, the Houthis took de facto control of much of Yemen, including the capital of Sanaa, about a decade ago. Ever since, the Houthis have intensified their hold over the Yemeni people and deepened ties with al Qaeda offshoots and pirates around the region.
“The fundamental problem is [that] the Houthis, a transnational armed group backed by Iran … started a civil war, took the capital, refuse to engage in dialogue, and feel they are entitled to rule the country by a divine promise,” said Nadwa al-Dawsari, an expert on Yemen and irregular warfare at the Middle East Institute.
In 2015, after Yemen’s capital fell to the Houthis, Saudi Arabia—with assistance from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and other allies, including the United States—launched an unsuccessful, yearslong war against the group.
The Houthis’ hold on the country only got stronger, Dawsari said, after a diplomatic initiative known as the Stockholm Agreement, agreed upon in 2018, gave the militants effective control of one of the country’s biggest ports—Hodeidah—which they turned into an entrepôt for money and weapons.
“The Stockholm Agreement was a turning point in the Yemen conflict. It strengthened them [the Houthis] militarily and enabled them to obtain resources,” Dawsari said.
For years, though, despite all the fighting, Yemen’s conflict was largely limited to the Arabian Peninsula. But since fall 2023, in the wake of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel and Israel’s devastating military response, the Houthis began targeting commercial ships transiting one of the most important waterways in the world—the gateway to the Suez Canal—in what the group said was an expression of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Hundreds of Houthi drone and missile attacks have damaged and sunk ships, chasing commercial shipping to the longer and more expensive route around Africa.
Those attacks prompted the Biden administration, as well as the United Kingdom and the European Union, to begin policing the sea lanes around the Red Sea. Now, according to the Trump administration, the gloves are off.
One question remaining is why Trump and the Pentagon are couching the campaign in the name of restoring “freedom of navigation,” in the argot used used this week by Pentagon briefers and three-star generals. For years, Trump has railed against the idea that the United States has an interest in securing sea lanes, suggesting instead that Asian countries that rely more on Middle Eastern oil should assume the burden themselves.
The bigger question is whether the ramped-up U.S. military campaign will bring the Houthi threat to heel, or just become an expensive game of whack-a-mole. (One European naval expert, who spoke to Foreign Policy on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of U.S.-NATO security discussions, described the new campaign simply as “madness.”)
“I’m skeptical,” said James Holmes, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, who cast doubt on the utility of naval airpower to cow land-based, nonstate actors. He questioned whether running down precious stocks of the pricey munitions needed for a possible future war in the Pacific is the best use of finite U.S. resources.
To really root out the Houthis would require more than a few Tomahawks and airstrikes, and a whole lot more commitment than Trump, or the U.S. public, has demonstrated so far.
“You have to be there—on the field of battle, grappling with the foe—in order to win,” Holmes said.
